Equally adept at narrative and documentary filmmaking, Akerman was the writer, director and sometimes the cinematographer of her films. She was the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, and her mother was confined at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the war. Several of Akerman's films touch on the issue, none more directly than Les Rendez-vous d'Anna. It is not her best-known film, but it is one of her most heartfelt. Throughout most of Anna's encounters, she remains aloof, but her connection with her mother is warm and intimate.
Some critics found Les Rendez-vous d'Anna as challenging or puzzling as Anna herself. Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times that the film "has a crisp, simple elegance at times...[but] Miss Akerman's attention to detail, like Anna's, is at times peculiarly excessive." Maslin concluded that "for all of its emphasis on discipline and precision, [it] begins to seem unduly self-indulgent...The film's handsome severity is impressive, but its restraint is ultimately more forbidding than provocative."
As in all her films, the images in Les Rendez-vous d'Anna are meticulously composed and confident. New Yorker critic Richard Brody, writing about a 2016 retrospective of Akerman's films, compared her to Orson Welles because she "revolutionized cinema with a film she made in her 20s." After seeing Jean Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou at age 15, Akerman declared that she knew she wanted to make films. A film school dropout, she moved to New York in 1971 and absorbed the work of avant-garde and experimental filmmakers who were working there at the time. She made several short films before moving back to Belgium and making her first narrative feature, Je tu il elle (1974), released when she was 23.
Akerman's second feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is her best known and perhaps most highly-regarded film. Years later, Brody called it "a signal act of modernism that fuses--or, rather, deconstructs--the classical melodrama with feminist ideology, personal history, documentary curiosity, video-art-like installations, and an extraordinarily straightforward, Gordian-knot-cutting way with character-based empathy." Jeanne Dielman is a widowed mother with a compartmentalized life. She is shown performing ordinary household tasks in all their humdrum detail. But while her son is in school, she works as a prostitute, receiving clients in her home. Brody called the film "The kind of radical artistic simplification that embodies and conveys an amazingly complex web of ideas... As such, it's one of the most influential--and one of the most surprisingly beautiful--films of the post-'68 era."
Akerman was a dedicated feminist, and all her films were strongly influenced by her feminism and her philosophical studies and theories, none more so than Jeanne Dielman. The film's succes d'estime did not translate into commercial success, but it did heighten expectations among feminist filmgoers for her next feature, Les Rendez-vous d'Anna. Akerman, again impervious to demands and expectations, stubbornly went her own way, continuing to make films that were true to her own vision in the ensuing four decades.
Akerman's final film was the charming yet poignant No Home Movie (2015), a documentary which consists of a series of conversations with her beloved mother Natalia, both in person and on Skype. It is a loving tribute to the woman who raised her, and who is fading away. Natalia Akerman died soon after her daughter finished shooting the film. No Home Movie could also serve as an elegy for Chantal Akerman herself: she committed suicide in October of 2015.
Director: Chantal Akerman
Producer: Alain Dahan
Screenplay: Chantal Akerman
Cinematography: Jean Penzer
Editor: Francine Sandberg
Production Design: Philippe Graff
Art Direction: Andre Fonteyn
Principal Cast: Aurore Clement (Anna Silver), Helmut Griem (Heinrich Schneider), Magali Noel (Ida), Hans Zischler (Hans), Lea Masari (Anna's Mother), Jean Pierre Cassel (Daniel)
B&W 127 minutes
by Margarita Landazuri
